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Chicago Reader//Aimee Levitt: In a lot of ways, Ellen Gates Starr High School in Logan Square isn’t much different from other CPS neighborhood schools. Enrollment and funding are down, and the school is on probation: the results of standardized tests from this year, currently in session, will determine whether it stays open.
Chicago Sun-Times//Hedy Weiss: Think of it as a fantasia on life in a Chicago public high school, performed throughout the three floors of an actual school building by actors who are either still in high school or have just begun college.
Albany Park Theater Project is one of this city’s great treasures — a company of teenage actors that creates highly imaginative original productions produced on both its home stage in an Albany Park area field house, as well as on the stage of the Goodman Theatre, where its audience has expanded greatly in recent years.
Clad in orange jumpsuits, a group of high school students carrying large suitcases trudged onto the center stage. Heads down with hands, feet and waists shackled, they took a seat on their suitcases while two girls dressed as nuns slithered through the “criminals” and settled in front of them.
“Watch this space for a big announcement” — that’s the message David Feiner, co-founder of the Albany Park Theater Project, posted Wednesday night to a Facebook group of current and alumni members of the theater’s youth ensemble.
This morning, Albany Park Theater Project was named a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. All of us at APTP – the youth ensemble, alumni, staff, and board of directors – are honored and overjoyed to celebrate this monumental news with the friends, audience members, donors, and partners who have nurtured our creative community over the past 19 years.
Happy new year to all of our wonderful APTP family and friends! As we welcome the new year, we look forward to all of the people and experiences we will encounter as we move toward our production of Learning Curve, our immersive theater performance that premieres this summer and places audiences within the walls of a Chicago public school and in the shoes of its students.
Critics and audiences have made Feast one of the most celebrated shows of Summer 2015. “Beautiful, honest, magical, thrilling, acrobatic, moving, spiced, wondrous, subversive, brave, visceral, provocative, joyful, propulsive, universal, delicious”…are some of the superlatives critics have lavished up Feast.
If you’re going to produce a theatrical production based on interviews with Chicagoans talking about food, Albany Park is as good a place to start as any. Not only is it one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city—and in the country—it’s also home to the Albany Park Theater Project, an ensemble of teenagers that has a history of producing shows that are honest, funny, and inspirational in the best possible way: after you see them, you want to do something.
WBEZ’s Morning Shift interviews APTP resident director, Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, and ensemble member, Ely Espino, about “Feast.” Listen here.